Pros and Cons of Living With Your Best Friend

Living with a roommate is a big part of many people’s college experience. If your best friend happens to attend the same school you do, or even if she’s living in the same city, you might want to live together. In some situations, living with your BFF is a great idea. In others, it’s a bad idea. Here are some pros and cons of living with your BFF to help you decide whether or not you should go for it.

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Pros:

You can hang out all the time!

You can stay up talking until the early hours of the morning, you can binge watch your favorite show together whenever you want, or you can sit in silence together as you both study. Either way, having your best friend around all the time can be a lot of fun.

It’s easy to talk and to make plans

The close proximity of living together makes it easy to talk to or to hang out with your best friend. You can easily ask her, “Hey, do you want to go to the movies later this week?” or to announce, “The cute guy from chem just texted me!”, when she lives in the same room as you.

It’s nice to room with someone you already know

Especially at first, it’s a relief to live with someone you already know rather than getting to know a completely new person. When everything in life is changing, it’s nice to have a familiar piece of home (especially someone as familiar as your best friend) with you.

You have a live-in support system

College life can get really stressful really fast. It’s nice to have someone at home you can turn to when the stress hits you. Who better to turn to than your best friend? If you live with your best friend, you can be each others’ live-in support system. You can support her, and she can support you.

Cons:

You discover their annoying habits

When you live with someone, their good qualities are amplified, but so are their bad ones. Habits that did not matter so much when you lived separately could become extremely bothersome when you live together. For example, it might have been easy to ignore your best friend’s habit of being messy when you lived separately, but now that you are living together, your BFF’s mess is directly affecting you and it can become annoying. Learning about these habits could put a strain on your close friendship. Before you move in together, have an honest conversation with your BFF to see if you can deal with each others’ habits, since we all have them.

It’s harder to get away from each other

Sometimes, you just need time to yourself, especially if you are around someone all the time. This can happen even if said person is your best friend. It’s hard to get that precious alone time when you live with someone else. Also, if you have a disagreement, it will be hard to retreat somewhere else to cool down when you share a space. Take your personality and your BFF’s personality into account. Is “alone time” important to your or to her? Think about that when you decide whether or not you want to live together.

Money issues become important

Living with someone involves having ongoing conversations about both of your financial situations. If you don’t live together, you might not talk about finances that much with your bestie (other than when you have to split a bill at a restaurant). But when you live together, you and your BFF will have to pay for things like rent, utilities, and any other association fees. You and your best friend will have to talk about how to split these bills. If these bills don’t get paid on time, it can cause arguments, even among the best of friends. Make sure your BFF is financially ready for this commitment before moving in together.

Distractions

Sometimes, it’s hard to study or get work done when you’re with your best friend. It’s easy to get carried away in a conversation when your best friend is around. (Remember that episode of “SpongeBob Squarepants” when SpongeBob and Patrick are in the same boating school class and they can’t focus on the class because they’re laughing at their inside joke? That’s a lot more relatable than I thought it would be…) If you and your BFF decide to live together, you have to be able to learn when it’s time to focus and when it’s time to have fun.

If you and your BFF attend the same school, living together might seem like a great idea. Sometimes, it’s the best decision you can make, but other times, it isn’t. Have a conversation with your BFF about the points I mentioned earlier to help you in your decision.